Page 74 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

Dressed in his signature lime-green suit, Tev sat at one of the tables, impossible to miss. The electric color caught the shifting light, casting a strange, luminous glow across his purple skin. He’d been trailing our tour for weeks as Zhari’s head of marketing—always nearby, always watching, and endlessly a step ahead. Beside him slinked Nova. She was making her way to a plate someone left behind with a half eaten Space Dog on it. Such a naughty seed.

My sketchbook was open between his forearms, a tablet propped up beside it. The way his shoulders were set and the way his wristband sat face-up and ready all said this was not a “Hey, look what I found” moment.

This was a sit-down conversation.

“That’s where it went,” I said, eyeing the sketchbook. “I’ve been tearing the bus apart looking for that.” I walked over to him. “Well, not literally, but… why do you have it? That’s private.”

I held out my hand.

“What are you doing leaving it lying around on window ledges?” he countered mildly. “You’re lucky it was me and not some overeager intern with a portable scanner,” he sighed, “or a cleaner who mistook it for garbage.”

“I didn’t leave it,” I muttered. “Well, not on purpose.”

He huffed a soft laugh and flipped the sketchbook around so it faced me.

It was open to the page with the arena crowd crammed into the foreground and the stage carved out at the far edge like a bright wound. The little six-legged headphone monster I’d doodled in the corner stared up at me, blank-eyed and smug.

Next to the book, on his tablet, that same doodle floated in the middle of a mock promotional slide. It had been cleaned up, punched out, and placed above the Lumara Sound logo as if it had always been there.

Underneath it, a stack of numbers glowed in cool blue.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to it.

“This,” he said, tapping his tablet, “is your little creature after we ran it with a mid-leg test group earlier.”

He swiped, and the graph expanded.

“They responded to it more than anything we’ve put out this leg. Better recall, higher positive association, more tags. Some twelve-year-old on Oris Station drew it on her face in glitter and called it a ‘Beats Bug.’”

“People… like it?” I managed as I sat down in front of him.

“People love it.” He leaned back, folding his arms. “Which is annoying, because up until now, our mascot options were ‘generic star swirl’ and ‘slightly different generic star swirl.’”

I stared at the tablet, the doodle still hovering above it.

“I did that in, like, ten minutes on a loading dock,” I said. “While half-asleep.”

“And that,” he said, “is what I find interesting.”

He tapped the open page again, but his finger didn’t land on the mascot. It landed on the crowd—the density of bodies and light and motion, the way the lines pulled toward the stage.

“This isn’t just cute,” he went on. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s very cute. But it also feels like the tour. It looks like the sound. Her costumes, the movement, the way you’ve framed the arena so the energy sucks you in—that’s brand instinct. You understand what a mark is supposed to communicate.”

Brand instinct.

The phrase sounded like something from a terrible corporate seminar. Coming from him, though, about my scribbles, it felt like someone had cracked open my chest and shone a light on a part of me I’d always assumed was imaginary.

“I draw things,” I said weakly. “That’s all I thought I was doing.”

“People who ‘just draw things’ don’t accidentally design the most effective visual we’ve put in front of fans this month,” he said. “You’re already doing the work. We might as well pay you for it.”

My pulse stuttered.

“Pay me?”

There was a strange, weightless little beat, like the universe inhaling.

He nodded once.